Comments on: Six ways to help TeleRead

By: Kevin Marshall

Kevin Marshall — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 00:24:59 +0000

I don’t know if it’s so much that people are using an ad blocker as people are probably just using a feed reader (like google reader that I use)…in fact the only time I ever click over to the actual site is to make comments like this…and so I never really see any of your ads or widgets, I just consume all the wonderful content and skip all the fat.

If you want your click-throughs to improve, you’ll probably have to figure out ways to get the ads worked directly into the post content…baking affiliate links directly into the content should also help.

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:33:17 +0000

Big thanks, Dhamu. Default Firefox doesn’t seem to block any of the ads. While the TeleBlog’s audience is more technical than most Net users, I suspect most aren’t doing anything special with blockers. Sure would love to figure out ways of raising the click-through rates. Further ideas welcome from you and others! – David

By: Dhamu

Dhamu — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:28:07 +0000

Adblocking varies by both browser and user. In Opera, I only see the NAEB and Moon Books ads, and only then because I haven’t explicitly blocked them, since I read the page at a zoom level that pushes the two less-useful right-side columns off-screen. The fanboy blocker I use also takes out other clutter from the page. In my backup browser, Firefox 3, Adblock Plus defaults to also allowing Feedbooks and Powell’s through as ads, but again, only because I haven’t bothered to specifically block them, because I only use FF for badly-written sites. I have to toggle Adblock off to see the three other ads.

But I know about adblocking, both how to use and how to disable it for false positives. My three less computer-savvy sibs, whose systems I’m responsible for when things go wrong, don’t use adblocking, because it’s easier for me to let them see ads than to have them complain about not being able to click the button they’re supposed to, but can’t because an adblocker mistook it for an ad and hid it from them. I consider it an accomplishment that I got them to use Firefox over IE. (Opera is better, IMO, but it does things differently enough that non-techy users can have problems with it, and some poorly written sites use incorrect browser sniffing, which lack of knowledge takes a bit of knowledge to work around.)

So, do you think your audience knows a bit about how their browsers work, or only knows what buttons to usually press? The former will likely block most ads, the latter won’t.